Climate scientists want no oversight

Revkin reports on the involvement of an organisation called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in a legal defence fund for climate scientists. I was interested in this bit about the application of FOI to universities:

Q: Finally, when the issue is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), there’s a murky line between what is fishing and what isn’t. Many FOIA requests of green groups over the years could be cast as such. This is one reason the Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, has walked a fine line in its statements on abuse of FOIA. Should a researcher using a state university e-mail address and working under federal grants be entitled to presume his/her correspondence is “private” (as described below)?

A: The central issue is whether the subject of the inquiry is public business. Generally, scientific articles submitted in the author’s name with a disclaimer that the work does not represent the institution falls outside what is official business. Our main concern is that industry-funded groups and law firms are seeking to criminalize the peer review process by obtaining internal editorial comments of reviewers as a means to impeach or impugn scientists.

The grants themselves and the grant reports are public but a federal grant does not transform a university lab into an executive branch agency – which is the ambit of FOIA.

By the way, as an adjunct to our whistleblower practice, PEER makes extensive use of FOIA to force disclosure of matters other wise buried in agency cubicles. A good example of one our science-based FOIA [requesets] is this.

"...seeking to criminalize the peer review process by obtaining internal editorial comments of reviewers as a means to impeach or impugn scientists"? Huh?

It can't be said often enough. If you want public money you have to accept public oversight.

Nature: British science needs integrity overhaul

Nature magazine has picked up on the BMJ survey of research misconduct in the UK - I posted about this a couple of days ago. The article carries the bold title British science needs `integrity overhaul'.

British scientists are fundamentally failing to deal with research misconduct, which is widespread in the country, leading experts have warned.

At a conference in London yesterday, participants were united in calling for more action on the issue.

“There is a recognition that we have a problem,” said Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and one of the driving forces behind the meeting.

I think it would probably help if journals like Nature stopped trying to cover up for the miscreants.

Corruption in the academy

There is a must-read article in the Daily Mail about corruption in British universities. The British Medical Journal have conducted a survey of British academics:

'The BMJ has been told of junior academics being advised to keep concerns to themselves to protect their careers, being bullied into not publishing their findings, or having their contracts terminated when they spoke out.'

(H/T BlackBadged, on Twitter)

Update on Jan 13, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The F/T has the story too, but in rather more detail.

Cosmos and consensus

This is a guest post by Kevin O'Sullivan

In his book Cosmos, published in 1981, Carl Sagan highlights the controversial issue surrounding the hypothesis proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky that the Planet Venus was spun off from Jupiter. Sagan gives his own reasons why this idea is implausible, but was troubled more by the cosy world of scientific consensus, and attempts made by some elements in the scientific community at the time to silence Velikovsky. It has a chilling resonance of the intolerance we see today emanating from the "consensus" view on climate change, and attempts by some proponents of AGW to block any opinion contrary to their own. The concerns expressed by Carl Sagan are as relevant today as they were back in 1981.

Cosmos: Chapter four. Heaven and Hell.

Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non-scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worse aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who call themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the evidence of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.

The IPCC and our “unbiased” science correspondents at the BBC would do well to adhere to this simple advice.

Information Tribunal oversteps the mark

On the whole I think the FOI regime in this country is pretty good, although there are some fairly large loopholes such as the inability to actually bring anyone to book for breaching it.

I've also had a relatively favourable impression of the FOI enforcement agencies - the Commissioner and the Tribunal.* However, I think the case reported here is one instance where the Tribunal has gone too far.

A landmark ruling was made this week which has raised more than a few eyebrows among scientific researchers.

Newcastle University lost its 3-year battle against the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) over revealing details of Home Office licences to conduct experiments on primates through Freedom of Information requests (FOIs).

...

However the Information Tribunal ruled that a recent decline in animal rights violence meant researchers were unlikely to become targets for extremists. It said: “Refusal to communicate with the public carries its own risks… creating the impression there is something to hide.”

There is an exemption in the FOI Act covering the issue of personal safety and I think it is there for very good reasons. The danger of attacks from the lunatic fringe is proven.

I  think a "recent decline" is not therefore a good enough reason to put names out in public. This looks to me like playing fast and loose with scientists' safety.

*The tribunal arrangements in Scotland are less satisfactory, being expensive and bureaucratic.

Academics: "No oversight for us"

This is a week old, but is rather interesting:

The government and the research councils have rejected suggestions that the UK needs a specific body to police research integrity.

The idea was floated by the Commons Science and Technology Committee in its report on peer review, published in July.

As one casts one's eye back to Climategate and the integrity failures by academics and administrators, and the Science and Technology Committee's Climategate inquiries and the voting down of any less-than-mild criticism of scientists by government MPs, and the peer review inquiry that followed that recommended some oversight, and now this...

...well it doesn't look very good does it?

Farmers

H/T to Richard Betts for this story.

Barclays claims a third of the UK's estimated 200,000 farmers (37%) will invest in renewable energy as it launches a new £100M fund to bankroll potential projects today (August 30).

The funding, which has been planned with support from organisations including the influential National Farmers Union (NFU), is aimed at helping farmers install all renewable technologies with Barclays including projected feed-in-tariffs (FITs) when assessing each loan.

So not only do we have to pay farmers through the nose via the Common Agricultural Policy but we have to pay them again via feed-in tariffs.

This will end badly.

Competing interest?

Updated on Dec 1, 2010 by Bishop Hill

There has been quite a degree of interest in the Louise Gray article in the Telegraph the other day - the one in which we were led to believe that a variety of scientists were calling for a halt to economic growth and the introduction of rationing.

Donna Laframboise is one person who has been taking a look at this story. She notes that Louise Gray is not presenting an accurate picture to her readers:

Click to read more ...

Peer reviewers acting as gatekeepers

Not a climate science story this one, but one from the world of stem cell research. The themes are remarkably similar to those emerging from the Climategate emails though:

Stem cell experts say they believe a small group of scientists is effectively vetoing high quality science from publication in journals.

In some cases they say it might be done to deliberately stifle research that is in competition with their own.

The GMC on data archiving

Medical science is a long way ahead of climatology on ethics, and the area of data archiving is no exception. Here is a quote from the UK General Medical Council's Standards Section.

Doug Altman, Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group: ‘‘Misconduct is the tip of a large problem.We shouldn’t forget that we should see this as part of a general effort to improve the quality and relevance of research, and arguably reduce the body of it.’’

But he said one of the factors hampering investigations was the lack of raw data and relevant documentation, the archiving of which should be mandatory for researchers. Employers should take on this responsibility, he said. There were also valid research reasons for the preservation of data. ‘‘It seems to me unbelievable and completely unacceptable that people can do research using public money and yet throw away the data. We could consider a failure to keep the data as research misconduct.’

(Emphasis added)